n only saw a crouching shape that
snarled and laughed: "'Tis but a hyena," they said. Once in the city
of Ag one of the guardians seized him, but Thangobrind was oiled and
slipped from his hand; you scarcely heard his bare feet patter away.
He knew that the Merchant Prince awaited his return, his little eyes
open all night and glittering with greed; he knew how his daughter lay
chained up and screaming night and day. Ah, Thangobrind knew. And had
he not been out on business he had almost allowed himself one or two
little laughs. But business was business, and the diamond that he
sought still lay on the lap of Hlo-hlo, where it had been for the last
two million years since Hlo-hlo created the world and gave unto it all
things except that precious stone called Dead Man's Diamond. The jewel
was often stolen, but it had a knack of coming back again to the lap
of Hlo-hlo. Thangobrind knew this, but he was no common jeweller and
hoped to outwit Hlo-hlo, perceiving not the trend of ambition and lust
and that they are vanity.

How nimbly he threaded his way through he pits of Snood!--now like a
botanist, scrutinising the ground; now like a dancer, leaping from
crumbling edges. It was quite dark when he went by the towers of Tor,
where archers shoot ivory arrows at strangers lest any foreigner should
alter their laws, which are bad, but not to be altered by mere aliens.
At night they shoot by the sound of the strangers' feet. O, Thangobrind,
Thangobrind, was ever a jeweller like you! He dragged two stones behind
him by long cords, and at these the archers shot. Tempting indeed was
the snare that they set in Woth, the emeralds loose-set in the city's
gate; but Thangobrind discerned the golden cord that climbed the wall
from each and the weights that would topple upon him if he touched one,
and so he left them, though he left them weeping, and at last came to
Theth. There all men worship Hlo-hlo; though they are willing to believe
in other gods, as missionaries attest, but only as creatures of the
chase for the hunting of Hlo-hlo, who wears Their halos, so these people
say, on golden hooks along his hunting-belt. And from Theth he came to
the city of Moung and the temple of Moung-ga-ling, and entered and saw
the spider-idol, Hlo-hlo, sitting there with Dead Man's Diamond
glittering on his lap, and looking for all the world like a full moon,
but a full moon seen by a lunatic who had slept too long in its rays,
for there was in Dead